Various methods and apparatus for fabricating wood trusses having their joints secured with toothed metal plates have been proposed over the last several years. My prior U.S. Pat. No. 3,212,694 shows an arrangement of horizontal supports carrying reaction pads to support the joints of a truss in horizontal position when a roller is passed thereover to set the teeth of the plates in the wood, and the truss is then passed through a stationary set of pinch rolls to fully embed the teeth.
A conventional method for fabricating such trusses has been to position the components on a horizontal bed or jig table with the toothed plates tacked on the top and bottom of each joint by manually hammering, then to pass a single roller press over the truss to partially embed the teeth, then to invert the truss, and then to pass the roller over the truss again to fully embed the teeth. This method requires the additional operation of inverting or turning over the truss.
It has been proposed in my prior U.S. Pat. No. 3,868,898 to provide a flat jig table of adjoining panels having sufficient flexibility to conform to the curvature of the lower of a pair of pinch rolls at the nip of the rolls, so that a single pass of the jig table and the truss thereon between the rolls would suffice to fully embed the teeth of the top and bottom plates. While this method has been substantially satisfactory the construction and support of the flexible panels has been expensive.
In all of such prior truss fabricating methods of which I am aware, little or no attention has been directed to the delivery of the various components to convenient locations readily accessible to the assembly table or to the conveying of the finished structures away from the assembly table to a storage area. These operations have been hit-and-miss operations involving excessive time, floor space and manual labor, with the conveying of the finished structures often interfering with the delivery of the components or vice versa.